Country diary: A chiffchaff has swapped north Africa for this icy reedbed

Winter is letting go its grip – for now, anyway. The hard freeze of early January relented somewhat this week; here in the wetlands of the Dearne Valley, the ice sheets drew back a little, if only a little, and a streak of dark clear water opened up by the far shore. A crowd scene developed: wigeons, tufted ducks, shelducks, a chorus of cormorant families on the bank, and, beyond them, on the grass, the heavy black bodies of coots, grazing in a herd like miniature water buffalo. A drake pintail moved elusively through it all like a reluctant celebrity, given away only by his crisp white shirt-front.

Away from the lake, this is a landscape of streaks, striations, cloud and sky, snow and willow, grass and ice. Finches are feeding busily in the alders, among the derelict birds’ nests. In the quiet ponds, thickets of reed have been warped by the weight of the weather. Shufflings and mutterings near the waterline turn out to be the ice beginning to yield. A small snow of down feathers drifts from the upper storeys of an electricity pylon: a female peregrine is plucking her prey up there, balanced awkwardly on the second crossarm.

There are other predators: a sparrowhawk briskly breaking cover to cross the frozen lake (as a descending mallard nails the land-and-slide, spinning gently to a stop by the wader scrape); a barn owl hunched and cold in the late‑morning grey; a stoat, a toothed and black‑tipped muscle‑twitch response, exploring the last of the snow.

In the window of the bird hide, four telephoto lenses converge abruptly on a point in the nearest reedbed. Something is flitting from reed stem to reed stem; an oddity, in our northern January, a brown-yellow-green glitch, calling anxiously, uh-wee, uh-wee, as it goes. It’s a chiffchaff, a leaf warbler, a meagre handful of bird that really ought to be wintering in southern Europe or north Africa right now – but instead is here, in South Yorkshire, beside the A6195, somehow still with us, the clockwork still ticking after three long nights of deep sub-zeros, and dancing through the ice.

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